Welcome to the most exciting time of the year for JetRails customers! The biggest sales events of the year are about to begin, and visitors are lining up, ready to click ‘Add to Cart.’ Hopefully, your hosting environment can handle the influx. At JetRails, we’ve been through this before and know how to help you get ready.
The focus of this guide is on your hosting platform. While there’s plenty to consider around checkout optimization, security patches, and conversion rates, our expertise lies in optimizing your hosting environment to ensure your servers stay up and running smoothly throughout the season.
Here’s your checklist for a worry-free holiday season:
Inspect Your Website for Bottlenecks
Common bottlenecks in Magento 2 often stem from third-party extensions that may cause unexpected behavior, such as high server load. Recently installed extensions can introduce load spikes due to database-intensive queries or inefficient code. We have seen this behavior in shipping, checkout, reporting, and other extensions from multiple vendors. To catch these issues, simulate live traffic and use tools like New Relic to identify potential bottlenecks.
Test Cached Browsing and Uncached Checkout
For general visitor traffic, it’s important to maximize caching at every level. This type of traffic represents the majority of site visits—potential customers who haven’t yet converted. Their experience must be fast and responsive, and effective caching helps your server handle a higher volume of visitors without performance issues. Leverage tools like Varnish for full-page caching, Redis for backend caching, and enable features on your CDN to minimize server processing and ensure optimal performance.
Next is the checkout process, which typically benefits less from caching. Activities like browsing, adding items to the cart, and checking out require more CPU and RAM. Thoroughly test and optimize these processes across multiple browsers, devices, and locations. Pay special attention to avoid any unexpected behavior caused by aggressive caching—sessions and shopping carts must remain isolated to each user.
Optimize for Performance
Performance optimization is crucial for handling heavy traffic. Some key areas to focus on include:
– Varnish for full-page caching
– Redis for session storage and backend cache
– Magento admin caching settings
– PHP OPcache adjustments
– Disabling unused extensions
– Offloading images to a CDN
– Preventing cron job overlaps
These are all complex topics that could each warrant their own deep dive, but they are beyond the scope of today’s guide.
After these optimizations, once again test your setup extensively to ensure everything is running smoothly.
Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Unoptimized images can significantly reduce your server’s capacity to handle traffic, but a CDN can alleviate this by caching images closer to the user. Solutions like Cloudflare, Fastly, and ImageEngine are excellent options for this. In general, a CDN is one of the most effective ways to reduce server load and deliver content quickly to users around the world. By caching and serving static files closer to the visitor’s location, a CDN not only reduces latency but also lightens the load on your servers, ensuring your site remains responsive and capable of handling higher traffic volumes.
Is your Varnish Working?
Sometimes, users believe they have a working Varnish setup, but their configuration may not be caching effectively. A properly configured Varnish cache can significantly reduce server response times. However, without the correct VCL configuration, traffic might bypass Varnish, sending all requests to the web server and causing CPU spikes and RAM Out of Memory conditions. Ensuring the VCL is properly set up will help handle high traffic volumes with minimal backend stress.
Enable Auto-Scaling if Available
Many of our customers already have the ability to automatically add web servers during peak periods and scale down during quieter times. This option might be disabled during the year to manage costs, so it’s crucial to confirm that auto-scaling is active before peak season arrives.
Scale Vertically
If horizontal scaling isn’t an option, consider vertical scaling by upgrading your server’s CPU and RAM. Although it’s not as flexible as auto-scaling, vertical scaling can give your site a significant performance boost. And even if auto-scaling is available, upgrading individual server resources (especially the database server) can be very helpful. Databases often become bottlenecks under heavy load, so increasing their resources can be particularly beneficial. On the other hand, Varnish, Redis, and OpenSearch/Elasticsearch generally won’t require additional scaling for holiday traffic.
The great news is that these steps are not just for Magento; they are also useful for Shopware, WooCommerce, WordPress, and Drupal or any mission-critical ecommerce website.
By following these steps, you can prepare your Magento 2 store to thrive through the holiday season.
At JetRails, we’re here to provide a reliable, scalable hosting environment that ensures your store stays online and fast, no matter how busy it gets. We’ve helped countless customers successfully navigate peak traffic periods in the past, and we’re ready to help you do the same. Whether you’re a current JetRails customer or simply looking for guidance, our experts are here to ensure your hosting setup is prepared for the holiday rush. Reach out to us today, and let’s make this season a resounding success together.